A blot against America

THERE is a moment in “The Plot Against America”, Philip Roth’s tale of America succumbing to 1930s-style authoritarianism, when the nine-year-old protagonist experiences a profound revulsion at the foibles on which wickedness thrives. “Never in my life had I so harshly judged any adult,” he recalls of his Jewish aunt’s preening over a brief interaction with the anti-Semitic president, Charles Lindbergh. “Nor had I understood till then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others.” That is as much respite as the recently deceased author, who combined a stubborn faith in America with a gloomy view of its politics, allows his reader. There is no chance of America sharing his awakening. The power of the boy’s epiphany lies not only in its clarity, but also in its futility.

Roth’s pessimism about the prospect of national redemption should be instructive to critics of President Donald Trump’s policy of caging migrant children in isolation from their parents. They hope voters will recoil from both this ill-fated debasement of American values and its architect. But not even the policy’s cancellation on June 20th will achieve that. Though America has experienced many moral corrections, from abolitionism to the civil-rights movement, they have never come in the emetic moment Mr Trump’s critics pine for. The tortured issues of race and national identity that explain its dark times, as they do now, are too contested. America’s moral shortcomings under Mr Trump, including his attempted Muslim ban, slashing of the refugee programme and draconian border policy, were the promises of his election campaign. There are indeed too many echoes of 2016 in this latest row for his opponents to feel triumphant.